Moby-Dick Week #7: “methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag”

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Speaking of madmen at the helm, this week we’ll be following Ahab into Chapters XLI – XLIV, comprising ‘Moby Dick’ (the white whale), ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ (the whale’s white), ‘Hark!’ (three soaked biscuits and a stowaway?), and ‘The Chart’ (Ahab’s navigations).

Ishmael has shrunk away somewhat from centre stage in the last few chapters, but he returns here to remind us that he, too, “was one of that crew,” another anon in the mob: our narrator is no voice of reason but as swept up as the rest in the pledges of allegiance to Ahab. He tries to justify why. If Ahab is the book’s true subject, in ‘Moby Dick’ we learn about the whale with whom he shares the stage, a subject similarly subject to Ishmael’s descriptions. The whale is a creature wrapped up in story and myth, “as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi.” Rumours sprout on his body like harpoons of different origins, while sightings spread him around the world until he seems both ubiquitous and immortal, a malignant and terrifying intelligence which only a crew of cannibals and castaways would be mad enough to chase.

But we’re not done yet. ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ is another encyclopaedic effort on Ishmael’s part, as he attempts to track whiteness—that paradoxical colour: both all colours and no colour—through the canons. White is a holy colour, a horrifying colour, a sharkish colour, the colour of heaven and the colour of skulls and death, a symbol of the infinite and of zero. Reading this chapter we are reminded (as Ishmael is reminded of everything, by everything) of Saruman’s white cloak, which he unweaves, like Keats’s rainbow, into the cloak of many colours: “‘In which case it is no longer white,’ said [Gandalf]. ‘And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’”

The descriptions here of Ahab’s lingering loathing of the whale reminded us also of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which according to one of our editions Melville had definitely read, and in which creator and creation, monster and maker, are similarly intimately linked, torn from the heavens and bound to a vulture-pecked world which simply isn’t big enough for both of them. Moby Dick and Ahab share the same “furrowed brow,” as we learn in ‘The Chart,’ and each only exists thanks to other: without all those fungi-stories sprouting from its back, Moby Dick would just be a whale; without the whale Ahab would just be, what? An ordinary whaler? An overreacher without a cause? In Ishmael’s telling, Ahab and the whale seem to deserve each other, but one wonders if it isn’t all rather one-sided.

“a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates.”

In ‘Hark!’, finally, it is suggested that the Pequod has some stowaways. Stay tuned…

Phrases of the Week:

“thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael”

“Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock”

Moby-Dick Week #6: “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell”

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Chapters XXXIII – XL this week, which comprise ‘The Specksynder’ (a guide to leadership), ‘The Cabin-Table’ (social czarship), ‘The Mast-Head’ (the high-minded), and five dramatic scenes: ‘The Quarter-Deck’ (introducing Moby Dick), ‘Sunset’ (madness maddened), ‘Dusk’ (Starbuck bucked), ‘First Night-Watch’ (Stubb’s laughter), and ‘Midnight, Forecastle’ (all the world’s a ball).

In ‘The Specksynder’ and ‘The Cabin’s Tale’ we get a sense of the strict hierarchy that governs social convention on the ship, once again realised through who eats what, where, when. This “witchery of social czarship” if flipped one way with Ahab at the head of the table, and then the other when the savage harpooners sit down to dine, though they seem to be having more fun at least (even at Dough-boy’s expense, when they pretend to scalp him).

‘The Mast-Head’ is a Cartesian meditation on the thinking thing, or what it’s like to be a head at the top of a long neck. After an encyclopaedic account of high places (the pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, Nelson’s column, etc.), Ishmael reflects that whale ships are similarly lofty and thought-full: a sort of “asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking care of earth.” Now that the American election is over, we can see the appeal of being lost at sea where news of “domestic afflictions; backrupt securities; fall of stocks,” and so on cannot reach you.

In ‘The Quarter-Deck’ Ahab speaks to the crew en masse for the first time and wins their commitment to the mission to kill the White Whale with the ounce of gold he nails to the mast. Moby Dick is first described here, and interestingly with a “wrinkled brow” of his own, suggesting he too is not a little Cartesian. Starbuck might seem like the voice of reason when he expresses sympathy for (or, at least, disinterest in) a “dumb brute” whale which cannot conceive of vengeance, but Ahab’s mania is compelling: he is “madness maddened,” he says, and he wants to “strike through the mask” of the world to reach whatever the whale represents.

‘Sunset’ sees Ahab alone at the window, soliloquising about his horror and hauntings, and we wonder if his quest can be called heroic if he’s so unhappy about it. Stubb laughs (“Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem!”) in the face of danger in ‘First Night-Watch’, and in ‘Midnight, Forecastle’ the rest of the crew join the celebration. All, that is, but Pip, who prays at the end to “thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here.” Very sensible.

Phrases of the week:

“Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”

“Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles!”

Moby-Dick Week #5: “soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities”

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Hello cetologists. This week we’ll be reading chapters XXVI – XXXII, comprising ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting the crew), ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting more crew), ‘Ahab’ (a man and his leg), ‘Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb’ (dreams of sleep), ‘The Pipe’ (hot water), ‘Queen Mab’ (nursing a bruise), and ‘Cetology’ (a concept of an idea).

This week comprised a sequence of catalogues, and we began with an account of the men on deck. By way of a sort of synecdoche of the crew at large, Melville introduces us to three mates first, and then three harpooners. Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask are our ‘Knights and Squires,’ which is to say they are white, minded, capital-A Americans who represent between them the major ports of call–Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket–as well as the complete range of attitudes to whaling: Starbuck has been around the block so many times the sun has baked him hard as a biscuit, and he is no “crusader after perils” but a pragmatic and “careful” killer; Stubb is “happy-go-lucky”, an “easy-going, unfearing man” whose pipe prevents his succumbing to the melancholy of the others; Flask, finally, has nothing but contempt for “the wondrous whale”, who is in “his poor opinion is […] but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil”. Out of many views, one crew.

The narrator speaks highly of these “selectest chapions from the kingly commons”, a paradoxical construction which harks back to the ‘royal salads’ in the last section. Our harpooners put the lie to the so-called democratic spirit of the mates, however. Where the white men “liberally provide the brains” on the ship, the harpooners are said to “supply the muscles” only. Interestingly, with them we get a similar spectrum of origin: Queequeg the Islander, Tashtego the native (whose tribes once “scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main”), and Daggoo the “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage,” before whom the tiny master Flask stands like a “white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” We like them all.

In ‘Ahab’ we meet the man properly at last and he is cast as a heretic from the get-go when the narrator describes him looking “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has ovverunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” Like Queequeg’s skin in the earlier chapters, Ahab’s body is also the subject of scrutiny among the sailors, and he is described here as a branded man, marked by some terrible scar like an old oak cleft by lightning. Already associated with Milton in the earlier section, Ahab here is quite smitten by God, a man who dreams at night of hell so “frightful hot” he cooks his own pillow. We wonder what he did to anger god so, and whether he constitutes one of Ishmael’s ‘God-fugitives’. Ahab may be part-whale, with his beautiful ivory (and very white) whalebone leg, but the ship itself becomes an extension of his body when he clicks his leg into place in holes made on the deck for the purpose. The crew, then, are there to be Ahab’s many eyes, as they look out for the “white one” on the horizon.

In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen.

Across ‘Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb’, ‘The Pipe,’ and ‘Queen Mab,’ Stubb reels from the insult Ahab hurls at him (along with a whole zoo of animals: he calls him a dog, “ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass”). Yet perhaps an insult from Ahab, the “Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans,” is worth a penny, if it means being noticed by such a man?

The long chapter ‘Cetology’ is enormous fun. It begins with a description of the “unshored, harborless immensities” of the ocean, but the line also speaks to a metaphorical, and perhaps even greater infinity–the ignorance at the edge of knowledge, chaos itself, the things we don’t know we don’t know–which the book, in the shape of The Whale, attempts to grapple with. The section reminded us of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942) in which animals are organised into peculiar categories:

  1. those that belong to the Emperor,
  2. those included in the present classification,
  3. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush.
  4. etc.

Stephen Jay Gould famously said that there is no such thing as a fish: any such category is a fiction that human beings put upon the natural world. Melville’s system is metafictional, self-aware, and well-aware of its limitations, and it works by picking a somewhat arbitrary definition (“a spouting fish with a horiztonal tail”) and running with it, arranging the whales who fit into this sentence from the greatest (in size, in value, in commonness) to the least great, using an appropriately bookish metaphor to divide them: the Folio Whales, the Octavo Whales, and the Duodecimo Whales. Rather intriguingly, the encyclopedic cetology chapter now has its own Wikipedia page, which details where Melville went wrong: we would now call the sulphur-bottom whale the blue whale, for example, though Melville lumps the latter into the long list of named whales which he doubts the reality of. “I omit them as altogether obsolte,” he says, and “can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.” This very Melvillian allusion to Shakespeare, as well as its anticipation of Faulkner, makes this chapter feel very contemporary indeed: encyclopedic, untrustworthy, oddly postmodern, and wholly his.

Phrases of the Week:

“Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair”

“I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans”

Moby-Dick Week #4: “At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided”

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Hello oysters. This week we’ll be reading chapters XVII – XXV, comprising ‘The Ramadan’ (Queequeg quiet as a doorknob), ‘His Mark’ (Queequeg the Hedgehog), ‘The Prophet’ (tales of Ahab), ‘All Astir’ (the Pequod is prepared), ‘Going Abroad’ (the hunt for a good seat), ‘Merry Christmas’ (setting sail!), ‘The Lee Shore’ (Bulkington redux), ‘The Advocate’ (an apology for whaling), and ‘Postscript’ (oily kings).

We finally set sail this week, but not before a few more chapters on the Pequod’s preparation. In ‘The Ramadan,’ Ishmael is most concerned about Queequeg’s silent treatment, and to Mrs Hussey’s dismay he smashes down the door to save him only to discover the cannibal in a state of religious meditation. Ishmael’s intolerant tolerance extends to all sorts of ‘strange’ rituals, but this one seems beyond the pale. Ishmael theorises that Hell and all “such melancholy notions”  are “first born on an undigested apple-dumpling” or on the empty stomach of a fasting religionist. The line between the civilised and the cannibal is policed once again according to what is (or is not) eaten: the Nantucketers make an empire of harvesting whales and chowder, for example, but a cannibal feast is as unthinkable as a cannibal’s fast.

Queequeg proves his mettle again in ‘His Mark’ with a well-aimed throw, and the captains are convinced by Ishmael to bring ‘Quohog the Hedgehog’ aboard: for his arm, at least, if not for the devil’s blue on his skin. The captains warn our sailors here that this is their last chance not to go, a rather foreboding note which sounds again in ‘The Prophet.’ It’s not quite clear why Ahab’s missing leg is the subject of a prophecy or what the rest of the prophesy entails, though if any man deserves a personal oracle it is probably Ahab. Ishmael is unsettled for a moment by these stories, as he is by Ahab’s prolonged absence, but he decides not to think too hard about them, even as Ishmael-the-writer hovers over the moment by virtue of framing the voyage in this way. Similarly, ‘The Lee Shore’ is the most present-tense chapter yet, insofar as Ishmael pokes his head in to write “this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington,” whose life, which we’ve hardly seen yet, is already wholly swallowed by his death which has not happened yet, and may not happen for some time.

Better to “perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee,” says Ishmael, but we can’t worry about that now because the boat is getting prepped in ‘All Astir’ with the help of Bildad’s sister—“like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither”—and we begin, in ‘Going Abroad’ to get sightings of the rest of the crew as well, including the (now very famous indeed) Starbuck.

Ishmael’s dismissive ‘Morning’ to the prophet of doom reminds us (or me, at least) of Bilbo’s similarly curt ‘Good Morning’ to Gandalf in The Hobbit, and just as the Fellowship departs Rivendell on the 25th December, so our ship gets going on Christmas Day, the ice on the Pequod’s bones like the “white ivory tusks of some huge elephant.” This is probably nothing more than an amusing coincidence, but it’s interesting that both of these quasi-‘grail’ narratives should be framed by the Christian calendar.

They have something better than royal blood there. […] all kith and kin to noble Benjamin–this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to another.

We discussed Melville’s knack of ending a chapter on a great line, and the unpredictability of the narrative: we never quite know what we’re going to get from a chapter, in either form or content. From Ishmael’s glorious ode to Bulkington (“Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps they apotheosis!”) we go straight into very practical details in ‘The Advocate,’ in which Ishmael defends his “butchering sort of business.” Employing a Socratic foil to monologue against, Ishmael makes great claims for whaling (the spreader of democracy even to double-bolted Japan; the spreader of oil even to royal heads in ‘Postscript’), just as he makes grand claims for himself. If I am to remembered, says Ishmael, remember me as an American, remember me as a whaleman, and remember me as the famous chronicler” for the “whale” who until now has never had one. I note that Melville features prominently on the Wikipedia page for the Sperm Whale, so this self-aggrandisement seems to have paid off in the end (even if Wikipedia’s writers have ignored his request to ‘call him Ishmael’: our man, I’m afraid, never gets a mention!).

Phrases of the Week:

“Step and growl; growl and go”

‘he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear’

Moby-Dick Week #3: “and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored”

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Hello Nantucketers. This week we will read Chapters XII – XVI, comprising ‘Biographical’ (Queequeg’s princely history), ‘Wheelbarrow’ (Queequeg earns a crew’s respect), ‘Nantucket’ (a mere “elbow of sand”), ‘Chowder’ (a world of cod), and ‘The Ship’ (in which we meet the Pequod and her captains!).

We begin this week with an account of Queequeg’s history, when in his youth in Rokovoko, the sight of Christendom and its extraordinary ships unlocked a familiar water-yearning in our “new-hatched savage.” Something like a slave in reverse, Queequeg went with “naked wrists” to try and catch a ship which would sooner have thrown him back overboard. Here and in the next chapters Queequeg proves his mettle by way of various courageous and physical feats, but his merit- is at odds somewhat with the -ocracy in which he finds himself: Melville undercuts his quest to the greener side with the realisation that “it’s a wicked world in all meridians,” and there may be no escaping that, especially if Ishmael knows more than he is saying when he alludes to Queequeg’s “last long dive.”

In ‘Wheelbarrow’ Melville pairs one cultural faux pas with another, unsettling once again our sense of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘cannibal’, which terms have been treated like antonyms throughout, albeit increasingly wobbly ones. Ishmael’s trip in the little ship ‘the Moss’ reads like another nod to Melville’s essay on Hawthorne; if the latter took the former to Shakespearean heights, ‘the Moss’ takes Ishmael away from the “turnpike earth” to the “magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.” Perhaps the sea defies description (how big would the novel The Sea have to be?), or perhaps it is only the means to an end: like the oysters in the previous section which “observe the sun through the water, thinking that thick water the thinnest of air,” Ishmael’s real interest seems to be in the life and death it holds under its surface, the whales of course and all that cod. Then again, maybe there’s some message in the medium…

Nantucket is a lonely patch of land lacking even weeds, but this works only to emphasise the extraordinary enormity of its watery empire which stretches over “two thirds of this terraqueous globe.” The imperialism in this boast is obvious, but it is tempered (a little) by the fact that the Nantucketers conquer the deep, not the shallows and the people who live there. From the perspective of the “walruses and whales” under their “pillows,” however, it must seem a terrible empire indeed. The Pequod itself is described as “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” That’s civilisation for you.

‘Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll–I’ll–yes, I’ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-colored son of a wooden gun–a straight wake with ye!’

Captains Bildad and Peleg are two “Quakers with a vengeance” who form an amusing double-act with their thees, their thous, and their short thrift, and it is thanks to them that we get our first descriptions of Captain Ahab. And what a picture we’re getting. If “all mortal greatness is but disease,” it seems significant that Ahab is off-stage, “a sort of sick,” his arrival delayed. If the whale is the “mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood,” Ahab also seems to have emerged straight out of Genesis or Milton: “a grand, ungodly, god-like man” who is “used to deeper wonders than the waves,” who has “fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales.” We wonder what on earth that means…

Phrases of the Week:

“I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle.”

“Thy lungs are a sort of soft.”

Moby-Dick Week #2: “a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity”

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Hello sailors. For next week we will read Chapters IV – XI, comprising ‘The Counterpane’ (Queequeg cuddles Ishmael), ‘Breakfast’ (Queequeg eats), ‘The Street’ (a trip around New Bedford), ‘The Chapel’ (a wannabe boat), ‘The Pulpit’ (where we meet Father Mapple), ‘The Sermon’ (the life and times of Jonah), ‘A Bosom Friend’ (just friends?), and ‘Nightgown’ (or something more?).

Guest author: Fawziya Albaqshi

This week’s chapters were mostly the image of domestic bliss, the honeymoon phase, if you will. If it were an episode of Friends, it would be called ‘The One Where Queequeg and Ishmael Cuddle’. The pair find comfort in each other’s presence and take full advantage of the time they have before they take on the open ocean. They share a bed, and Ishmael works hard to prove he can make this ‘house’ a home. He softens at the sight of the “savage” Queequeg praying to his idol and momentarily sets aside his Presbyterian beliefs to join his “bosom friend” in prayer.

These two scenes are cut across by Ishmael’s stroll through New Bedford and the lengthy description of a boat-themed chapel, a surprisingly high pulpit and a word-for-word recounting of Father Mapple’s sermon.

Before the sermon begins, we see a visual representation of the plaques that hang in the chapel, tablets erected in loving memory of those lives lost at sea. It is an immersive experience to be in a chapel that is built in tribute to whaling boats. It is also a warning, one that informs both the reader and the characters of the dangers of whaling and the undeniable fate that could be their own at any moment. Ishmael does not dwell on it, but Father Mapple certainly does.

After a respectable climb up to the pulpit, Father Mapple begins his sermon detailing the life of Jonah in more detail than found in the Book of Jonah itself. He, who “seemed tossed by a storm himself”, spoke of how Jonah was cast away, how he ended up in the belly of the beast and how “God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.” An ominous threat accompanied by a moral lesson that one must “preach the Truth to the face of falsehood.”       

Father Mapple spoke with the “manliest humility” but could not hold himself back from being pulled into the dramatics that Melville’s pathetic fallacy paved the way for. The storm outside only spurred the preacher on and gave a taste of what was to be expected on the trip to come: a storm both in the mind and in the sea. But that is for the future, as of right now, Ishmael and Queequeg are too busy cuddling to imagine their own names on plaques hanging in the Whaleman’s Chapel.

Phrases of the Week:

“Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

“In New Bedford, fathers […] portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.”

Moby-Dick Week #1: “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open”

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In which we discuss the cover, the title, the Etymology, the Extracts, ‘Loomings,’ ‘The Carpet-Bag,’ and ‘The Spouter-Inn.’

Our voyage is off to an excellent start. Any preconceptions we might have had about Melville’s novel being overly long or tedious or Britannicaly dry are squashed immediately by the amusing introduction to a “painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub” Librarian, who has dug down into the archive to uncover all he can about whales. The quote from Genesis, which begins the ‘Extracts’ proper, seems like a good place to start, and the extracts which follow all contribute pieces to the puzzle of the whale: it is a monster, a guardian of passages to the new world, a sea of profitable oil in a sack of sea-bound blubber, the biggest, the greatest, the thing that all cultures seem to have encountered, at least at the dark edge of their imaginations.

Ishmael, so-called, has won all of our hearts already. Very ‘Anne-with-an-E,’ we find him charming, self-aware, his tongue-in-his-cheek, wise and a bit buffoonish all it once. A grub like the Sub-Sub, Ishmael’s desire to “see the watery part of the world” leads him right away to reveries in ‘Loomings’ about Bartleby-like clerks “nailed to benches” against the sea’s magnetic pull; to the artists’ elements, of which water is a necessary one; to the pay and price of sea-journeys. Melville’s voice, in all sorts of ways, seems ahead of its time, and like some of Pynchon’s great anti-heroes in the 20th century, Ishmael sees clues and meanings and the “key[s] to it all” everywhere (like threads for his overactive ‘loom’).

Melville’s treatment of race is complex from the get-go. Slaves are on Ishmael’s mind already (though his comparison of his lot to theirs is comically ill-considered!), and his glimpse into the “negro church” where a “black Angel of Doom” is preaching “the blackness of darkness” seems to bear more significance than Ishmael, at least in this chapter, allows: perhaps this should be read as an intriguing allusion to the ‘power of blackness’ that Melville describes in “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” perhaps a troubling expression of the black-and-white Christian baggage that slaves in this setting have inherited. The devotion of the book to Hawthorne, the New Bedford setting, and the allusions to “those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men,” set Melville’s own leviathan effort against the backdrop of a wholly American tradition, yet in the 19th century this is also an increasingly global tradition: the Dos-Passos-esque newsreel about the Presidential Election and the First Afghan War (between which “One Ishmael” is sandwiched) paint a broader picture and hardly date the book at all.

The final chapter this week sees Ishmael imagine a cannibal bed-fellow into terrible being. The head-seller, the tomahawk wielder, the man of tattooed, too-black, too-purple skin, Queequeg is the quintessential ‘Other’ and everything Ishmael seems to think he isn’t, but like an Elizabethan stage-plot in which two lovers find themselves entangled in a bed in the dark, the Christian and the cannibal become very intimate indeed.

Great books teach you how to read them, and the library of extracts, the defaced oil painting which can only be understood by “diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it”, not to mention Queequeg’s own skin which takes some interpretating, these we might call Lesson #1.

Phrases of the Week:

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

“I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

I, Kitty and the future of technology

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While taking notes on secondary sources for my dissertation chapter on fictional maximalism in the work of Karen Tei Yamashita, I had the pleasure to discover, almost by chance, a short story by that same author that appeared on the American literary journal Ploughshares in the fall 2014: I, Kitty. Its central themes – the plasticity and disposability of the body, especially the female body, the dangers of an uncritical embrace of technologies, and environmental concerns – resonated with several aspects discussed at the American Studies Book Club monthly meeting in November 2020, when the book club was guest hosted by our very own Mairi Power. On that occasion, Mairi presented her PhD research on Jennifer Egan before opening up the floor for the attendees to share their ideas on Black Box, a science-fiction short story originally published in 2012. What follows is a collection of my impressions and thoughts around Yamashita’s, and partly Egan’s, texts.

I, you, she: Who is speaking?

Like Egan’s Black Box, I, Kitty is narrated almost entirely from a second-person perspective. In Yamashita’s short story, however, the use of the pronoun ‘you’ is even more ambiguous because it seems to be aimed at disguising the true narrator: Kitty, a cute plastic caretaker doll with artificial intelligence. By addressing the other human characters as ‘you’, Kitty initially compares and contrasts her programmable and limitless cognitive abilities with the permeability and constraints of the human body and mind, in what sounds like a typical marketing style. In the central part of the story, the ‘you’ perspective aims to invite the reader to emphatise and identify with the doll’s owners, a Brazilian family of Japanese descent that migrates back to their parents’ homeland in search of lucrative work. Kitty presents the point of views of the father, mother and Japan-born son, accompanied by details about their individual experience as immigrants. The doll is the joining link of the three family members, a symbol of their social mobility, but also of the dreadful possibility that we really are letting technology crawl too deep under our skin, allowing machines to undermine our own identity.

Disposable bodies

Kitty describes the human body as permeable and disposable, imperfect compared to her plastic beauty, because subject to the limitations of an ‘organic history and makeup’. However, it is artificial intelligence, with its virtually unlimited cognitive functions, that makes the doll an invaluable and irreplaceable machine for her owners. In a world where even technological artefacts are classified according to a precise hierarchical order (with Kitty at the top, thanks to her ability to speak multiple languages and operate any other piece of machinery), how do humans keep in control? In Yamashita’s story, the disposability of the human body is represented mainly through the male characters. Once in Japan, the husband and father finds work in a recycling yard, a place where scraps of machines are sorted out for ecological purposes. This ‘dirty thankless controlled labor’ exploits the body of the man, who in return gets only money. Little is said about his sense of identity, which is ultimately determined by his ability to buy new machinery for the home, to go back to Brazil and open his own business. The grandfather, the old patriarch who immigrated before the war, was left behind with his nurse, bedridden, when his son and daughter-in-law left in search of better fortune. His physical and mental decay, caused by age and dementia, transform him into a symbol of technology’s ability to reprogramme and replace us.

A look at women characters helps further explain this logic. In Japan, the mother and wife works numberless hours in a hospital. Her job is very similar to that of Maria, the old man’s nurse, who spends ten years at his side, constantly looking after him. The exhausting, underrated and sometimes unpaid work of women in taking care of children, elderly people, the sick and the household is here exposed and denounced in its several nuances. Both women get replaced by Kitty on several levels. The mother has to rely on the doll’s ability to interpret between Brazilian and Japanese because her young son was born and educated in Japan. Back in Brazil, she can work with her husband only thanks to the presence of Kitty in the house. Maria is replaced, too, in her nursing activities by Kitty’s ability to learn quickly and repeat endlessly. Significantly, the old man, unable to perceive the difference between his two caregivers, falls in love with the plastic doll and forgets about his devoted human nurse.

Epistemological concerns

The question, it seems, is how we can defend ourselves from technology if we need it so badly. We created a world in which a Japanese-born emigrant cannot pass for Japanese anymore, or at least not better than a made-in-Japan miracle like Kitty, a symbol of the country’s roaring economy and technological progress. The doll’s cognitive abilities seem limitless, making her an indispensable repository of memories, instructions, detailed information. But ‘”know” is probably not how Kitty functions.’ All she does is store, record and mimics. She is her owners’ ‘salvation and demise,’ because she can replace them all only thanks to their desire to be fooled by a big plastic doll. In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. In fact, Kitty can learn only so long as humans teach her, provide her with context. It is not her fault if they rely too heavily on her.

Maria is the only character who is not beyond salvation. The text signals this in two ways: she is the only outsider to the Brazilian family of Japanese origins, and the only one whose story is narrated using the pronoun ‘she.’ The use of the third person highlights the distance between Maria and Kitty, a distance that the doll cannot bridge because Maria does not own her. For all her sophisticated functions, Kitty cannot reverse her relationship with the woman and, therefore, she cannot speak from Maria’s perspective either. All she can do is observe her, surveil her and acquire information. But this is not enough to control the nurse. Maria is the only character who, despite Kitty’s omnipresence and omnipotence, keeps communicating with other people. Once the doll takes over her tasks, she uses her extra time to talk on the phone with friends, family, her distant kid, even TV show hosts. Replaced by technology, she still behaves like a human being, cultivating true, human relationships that, in the end, are there for her to resume, once the family (supposedly) moves out after what seems to be the death of the old patriarch. Kitty stays behind. It is not clear whether she orchestrated the ‘removal’ from the house of Maria and the other machines that takes place at the end of the short story. Diligently, she returns to the bedroom, where the old man’s numbers – blood pressure, temperature, heart beat – ‘are all zero.’ Like us, she didn’t understand what was going on.

YAMASHITA, KAREN TEI. “I, Kitty.” Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 2/3, [Ploughshares, Emerson College], 2014, pp. 183–87.

The short story is available online through the University of Glasgow Library catalogue.

Welcome 2022!

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Happy New Year from the Andrew Hook Centre of American Studies! We hope you had a good time over the Christmas break and you’re ready for the challenges of this new term.

We are excited to share with you our seminars programme for semester 2. For the time being, we still plan to meet on Zoom, so please do contact us on Twitter or through the information provided in our newsletter in order to receive the link.

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Tuesday 18 January 4.00: Alex Ferguson (University of Sheffield), “Reassessing US Involvement in Ngo Dinh Diem’s Appointment: Nguyen Huu Tri and the American Search for a ‘Third Force’ in Vietnam, 1950-1954”

Tuesday 1 February 4.00: Laura Kettel (Freie Universität Berlin), “Unequal Streets: Homelessness Policy in the American City”

Tuesday 15 February 4.00: Erik Mathisen (University of Kent), “The Making of the Atlantic Working Classes: Slavery, Emancipation and Free Labor in the 1830s”

Tuesday 1 March 4.00: Fionnghuala Sweeney & Bruce Baker (University of Newcastle), “Moses Roper in Scotland”

Tuesday 15 March 4.00: Ben Anderson (University of Edinburgh), “Vermont, Ethan Allen, and Allegiance,1749-1791”

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In addition to our guest speaker events, the Andrew Hook Centre will also be hosting the 2022 Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) annual conference on 5 March. Further details will be announced soon. In the meantime, you can still submit a paper proposal: the deadline for abstracts is 17 January 2022.

We will also keep you updated on the date and programme of the 2022 Gordon Lecture in American Studies (here you can find a list of the previous lecturers).

All our best wishes for the new term. We look forward to engaging with you all soon!

The Andrew Hook Centre blog team

Cover picture: License CC-BY 4.0 torange.biz

Reading Through The Summer Of A First-Year AmLit PhD Student

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Sadly, last summer is little more than a collection of distant memories already, but if like me you’ve been surfing from year 1 to year 2 of your PhD over the past few months, you’ll probably have a stack of notes on your desk that remind you how you spent those lovely sunny hours. Now that I’m finally sifting through them while I draft my first thesis chapter, I’d like to share with you some of the most thought-provoking books that kept me company during my first PhD summer in Glasgow. Maybe one day they’ll come in handy for your research, too. In any case, they’ll make a very interesting reading, I promise!

Non-Fiction Jive

Reading In Detail – Naomi Schor

My research project deals with maximalism, where details are a core element of the narrative. Reading this book about the gender-biased aesthetic value that they have historically been granted has been illuminating and has also inspired me to turn this aspect of my research into a series of tutorials that I’ll hopefully deliver next semester as part of this wonderful initiative. Schor’s work explains that the negative association between details and the feminine dates back to Classic Greece and has relentlessly evolved throughout western history in two interconnected directions: ornaments as a sign of effeminacy and decadence – included the associations women = nature, instinct and materiality as opposed to men = rationality, abstraction, civilization – and feminine details as an excessive, emotional representation of trivial domestic settings. A highly-recommended book if you wish to know more about the aesthetic principles underlying the debasing of female art.

Gender And Knowledge, Elements Of A Postmodern Feminism – Susan J. Hekman

One of the purposes of my research project is to explore the dynamics underpinning the ongoing marginalization of certain social groups, especially women. Since maximalism is strongly linked to information and the display of knowledge, I chose to begin my study by investigating the mechanisms which have historically maintained power in the hands of white males by regulating the production, distribution and access to knowledge in western societies. Hekman’s book brings postmodernism and feminism together and offers a brilliant critique of western ontological and epistemological dichotomies such as rational/irrational, subject/object, nature/culture. It provides a wonderful basis for individual critical reflections about the other, especially within the field of women’s studies.

Essay Collections on Feminism

In order to establish a feminist critical framework which could encompass and give equal value to the specific issues of different groups of women, as they are represented in my fictional primary sources, I needed to improve my understanding of feminism and feminist theories. Two books have proved fundamental to this end and extremely pleasant to read. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader edited by Sandra Harding helped me develop a new approach toward any literary text, one which would account for the necessity to define the very specific standpoint from which an author has decides to speak. The global imposition of a western/white-women perspective is sadly still a frequent issue within and across feminist movements. Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology reconsiders current analyses of science fiction as a genre and, despite working primarily with(in) SF, offers alternative, feminist ways of considering the relationship between subjectivity and identity, which I found helpful for students and researchers of several disciplines.

Grappling Fiction

Ducks, Newburyport – Lucy Ellmann

You might be wondering why I decided to read all these books. Well, here it is. Lucy Ellmann’s hefty 2019 novel is part of my PhD primary sources, a novel that I don’t hesitate to describe as a masterpiece of contemporary female maximalism. Its +1,000 pages might put you off, but fret not. It won’t take you long to realise that, like its author said, anyone can read it, ‘give or take a few babies.’ I believe Ellmann is one of the most provocative, refreshing and powerful voices in today’s literary landscape. Her radical feminist stance is as tragically essential as it relies on irony for conveying its message. Regardless whether you might be willing to support a universal shift to matriarchy in order to try and save this world, Ducks, Newburyport is a welcoming door open on a private conscience the like of which has seldom appeared in literature before. At the beginning, its stream-of-consciousness narrative is a bit overwhelming, but then it turns into a paced, lulling litany of thoughts and memories, both happy and sad, offering fascinating, intimate snapshots of a bright female mind. If you feel you need help to better enjoy Ellmann’s writing style, I suggest you read some of her interviews, as most critical reviews are cluttered with clichéd comparisons to ‘canonical’ male maximalist novels – or this interesting analysis by Emily Yang. For a complementary reading: Ellmann’s collection of essays, Things Are Against Us, has just came out.

Ceremony – Leslie M. Silko

Did you ever feel guilty for granting yourself the time to read a book for pleasure, in spite of the fact that your list of academic secondary sources only kept getting longer? I’d been looking forward to reading Ceremony since I started working on my MA dissertation on Almanac of the Dead, a novel that is also part of my PhD project. I couldn’t wait any longer, therefore I took a break from my research (the novel is really short, but don’t rush through it, I suggest) and plunged into this mesmerizing account of Native culture set in the late 1940s – and throughout American Indians’ history. Upon his return from WWII, where he couldn’t save his cousin Rocky’s life, Tayo suffers from PSTD. At least according to white doctors. His illness, in reality, has multiple causes, from the clash between life in the army, with its false promises of erasing racial differences, and the harsh reality of the reservation, to the plague of alcoholism to which too many Native lives are still lost today. Only a ceremony will save him, as it helped his ancestors redeem themselves from the evil influence of witchery centuries before.

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Biographical Note

Elisa Pesce is a second-year PhD student in American Literature at the University of Glasgow, and is co-leading on the Andrew Hook Centre of American Studies blog this coming session. Elisa loves books, wine, music, and – above all – a combination of the three. Her research project looks at contemporary women maximalist fiction as works of literature that help expose the historical mechanisms underlying the ongoing exclusion and oppression of certain social groups.

Feature Image: ‘Summer reading, 2015’ – CC revbean